A dedication to the Long War, American foreign policy, the siren call of Afghanistan, fly fishing, and coming home.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Goodbyes

When you graduate the Fort Riley Training Mission and are granted the non-existent but still impressive title of “Combat Advisor,” you are rewarded with a final bit of leave home prior to heading out. For us, this was short, too short, but this is always the case.

The pre-deployment leave is a desperate, uncomfortable type of leave. With the impending separation looming large the entire period is spent in a hushed anxiety with stifled emotion. The elephant in the room puts everyone on edge. You try and assuage the fears, and this is most easily accomplished by trying to change the subject. Confrontation is avoided as much as possible with all those around you. In this setting, one assumes that no frustration is worth a fight so more often than not, everyone agrees with everyone. Using that as a template, perhaps we should deploy both houses of Congress to Afghanistan in the hopes that they all shake hands smile, hug, kiss, and agree on everything before departing.

Such a conciliatory attitude makes the pre-deployment conversations difficult at times. When people tell me what we should be doing, my instinct is to politely ask them to “shut the f*#! up, and sit there for two hours while I explain what I know of Afghanistan.” What an obscure country with an even more obscure mission. This is why veterans don’t discuss their experiences with their families. It’s not that he will have a Born on the Fourth of July style meltdown, pee his pants, and start screaming at the heavens. Instead, the problem is just that no one knows enough to even buy-in to your conversation. The ante is too great. No one knows what FOB, ETT, PMT, PRT, DoS, M1151, RG33, DFAC, MWR, HMFIC or any of the three million acronyms and jargon we use mean. Beyond the language, the reference just isn’t there. To have a topical free and easy conversation about this, I need to have someone who actually KNOWS Afghanistan. It’s a world away, and maybe I’m not the best at communicating it. If you’re reading this blog though, keep heart, and as the tour rolls on, I hope to at least partially educate (used loosely).

There are too many responsibilities on your final leave. Too many people to see, too many hands to shake, and too memories to create. You want to spend quality time with every individual that you care about, but the calendar simply won’t cooperate. The time is spread a little to thinly. Really, you miss out on the depth with that one individual of whom you’re thinking about the most. You realize though that even if you had more time, the looming deployment would keep the conversations much the same. More difficult than the amount of people, is the tone of each encounter. The urgency of each meeting is palpable and you try to turn each moment into a golden one. More often than not, they turn out to be very bronze and sometimes aluminum.

Eventually, the visit comes to a head right around the last day, and nearly all the pretense of normalcy is dropped. Very few people I know or have ever met have a screenwriter who lives in their head that relays to their mouth killer lines to deliver at the perfect moment. Instead, people say exactly what is necessary with as little window dressing as possible. Here’s an example of a final goodbye: